This blog provides observations, suggestions, and instructions for using technology for genealogy. I'm a working technical writer and I use these tools daily.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Setting Up a Book Template Part 13

Well, if you followed the last set of instructions, you ended up sorta where you started. You have a 30 page document. Now it's a matter of what you're going to do with this 30 page document.

If you don't have a copy of the template open, open one. We're going to execute the template. We're going to assume that in addition to the Introduction and Chapter 1, which is already there, you want to add five more chapters for a total of six chapters. You know this drill.

Adding Chapters

Scroll to Appendix A.

Click in front of the A in Appendix.

Insert a Next Page break.

Hit the up arrow once to move your cursor to the previous empty line.

Type Chapter 2.

Hold down the Enter key to add a total of four pages of empty pages.

Scroll to the top of the third of the four empty pages.

Double-click in the header area and replace the header text (Appendix A) with Chapter 2. You just broke the Appendix A header but we'll fix it later.

Repeat steps 1 through 8 until you have a total of six chapters. You'll add a total of 20 pages and now you have a 50 page empty document...50 pages with working headers, footers, and sequential page numbers.

Scroll to Appendix A, and then on to the third of the four empty pages.

Double-click in the header. You should see it saying Same as previous.

Remove Same as previous from the header. I'm going to assume you know how to do this task.

Replace Chapter 6 with Appendix A: etc.

From this point forward, you can click in any empty line in any chapter and begin to type text, insert graphics, or import information from genealogy reports. It doesn't matter where you work until you're ready to finalize your book.

You can add all of these chapters when you're creating the template if you want to deal with a 50 page template. At work, I routinely deal with ten plus chapter templates. The point of creating a template is to give yourself a framework for a document with working page numbers, headers, and footers. Once they are working, you can stop worrying about the mechanics of dealing with software and concentrate on writing your book.

In the next post, I'm going to talk about cleaning up and finalizing your document. In the meantime, you can just write...sprawl all over the page...neatness doesn't count...we'll clean up later. As long as you don't put in any section breaks, your page numbers, headers, and footers will just come along for the ride.

This point is where I need to remind you that page breaking and the type of page breaking you do is important for results. If you need a refresher, see How Many ways can you break a page?. You're interested in methods 2, 3, and 4. Avoid method 1 because it's section breaking, which you don't want to do.